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Human Rights Watch has published a scathing report titled "India: Stop Treating Critics As Criminals" (Click to read) on the the ways, it posits India handles dissent. When I objected to it on Twitter, Ms. Meenakshi Ganguly from HRW told me that this refers to the colonial laws and not to the current political dispensation and also is not particular about India but such reports are prepared for other countries (particularly colonial countries as she would say). I asked her that by the definition of colonial it would also include US and Pakistan and asked her links to report on these two countries, which is awaited. For some reason, there has been a tendency to broad-brush India as such of late. I saw particularly scathing, and largely unsubstantiated articles in newspapers like Guardian when Indian PM Narendra Modi was to travel to the UK. They would innocently appear when Modi was to interact with the west in International papers, and when there was an election in Indian me…

Couple of months back, it occurred to me that while in a world of WhatsApp and Twitter, Urdu poetry has come into vogue after being vaguely dormant for a long time. Owing to the wit, the wisdom and snappy style, while it has grabbed the attention of the millennial child, but it still lacks the affection it got in pre-90's days. The tragedy of any language is to link it to a religious faith and elevate it with puritanical elitism to such a level, where it becomes obsolete. A language is like a lovely butterfly, which needs to play, dance, float and fly in an open garden. Once it gets appropriated by elite, it loses its gait, its charm and eventually its life. This happened to Sanskrit, to Persian and seemingly Urdu faces the same challenge. Although this is not a singular plight of Urdu as a language, in a world of emoji, all classical languages bear the brunt of too much of technology and too little of time. With this in my mind, I created a fresh page on my blog, dedicated to the…

Published : 12th of April, 2016, Harper Collins On a pleasant August Night, in 1947, India’s First Prime
Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, declared India as Sovereign Independent
nation, with a fervent speech talking about the India’s Tryst with destiny. The
speech became a hallmark of Indian Polity on post-independence world. Tavleen
Singh, noted writer and political commentator, who like most of us, borne
post-independence, three years after the Independence of India, in her book “India’s
Broken Tryst’ refers to the sixty-years of mis-governance which peeled off
whatever hope and pretense of glory we had in us. This is not a voyeuristic insider
report, which I had expected when I picked the book. To be honest, I expected
some first person account of the mechanization of 10 Janpath, which are
increasingly becoming visible with the defense scams coming to fore with every
passing day. This book actually cuts too close, too near the author. It opens
with the Raid of Enforcement Director…